“May I help you?”
The week after the funeral Sophie had moved out of the apartment she and William J. had lived in. The truck had crisscrossed the streets of Remsen. Boxes bursting at the seams, grocery bags with clothes spilling out the tops. A single room in the upper back end of Katherine Dillon’s house next to the Remsen post office.
Shortly after it happened, William T. had woken to the silence of 4:37 A.M. North Sterns. 4:37. He had woken at that time since he was a teenager.
He had put Genghis in the passenger seat and covered him with his blue blanket. He had crumbled a saltine and strewn the crumbs in front of Genghis, who had ignored them. William T. had gone through his usual debate over the seat belt. In the event of an accident, would it help or hinder an eleven-pound cat?
Belt? No belt?
William T. stood in the cold going over it, the pros and the cons, the whys and why nots, like someone who had lost his mind. The hell with it. He clicked the belt shut over Genghis’s small, silent form.
He had driven up to Remsen and parked in front of the post office. He had walked around in back, where Katherine Dillon had rigged a fire-escape staircase up to Sophie’s room. His rubber-soled boots made no noise on the steel risers. He climbed to the top and peered into the window, holding Genghis inside his jacket so as to keep him warm.
The light over the miniature kitchen sink was burning. There was always a light burning at Sophie’s; she was scared of the dark. She had told William T. stories of her childhood: leaping once onto her bed from four feet away to avoid the monsters, she had fallen and fractured her skull. The closet door had to be shut at all times because once, as a toddler, she had glimpsed the dark shape of her mother’s bathrobe hanging there, a dark lady waiting to suck Sophie’s breath from her in her sleep.
William T. raised his hand to knock on the window— might she be awake?
What the hell would he say when she came to the door? That he just wanted to see her? That he wanted to see her standing there, her Sophie self, peering up at him, alive?
Knock.
She hadn’t come to the door. Knock. Knock.
Knock.
Nothing.
William T. had peered into the dimness and seen that Sophie was asleep. She had been asleep on the far right side of the bed, curled up on her side, a pillow clutched to her stomach.
William T. had leaned back against the metal railing of the fire-escape staircase. He felt the steel bar through his jacket and shirt and undershirt, pressing cold against his flesh. Sophie, his daughter-in-law, his child, the girl he had known since she was seventeen and his son was on fire for her. William T. had cast his gaze back and forth across a sky that held no stars.
Genghis had strained against his chest and William T. unzipped the top few inches of his jacket. The cat poked his head out, straining his throat against William T.’s cheek. You got something to say, Genghis, say it. The cat arched his back and opened his eyes, gazing up at the night. If you could talk, what would you say, cat?
Then his son as a little boy had come to him, held out a small phantom hand to his father. William T. had taken it. The northern lights spread their unearthly pulsing play of color against the night sky and then disappeared.
“And that’s the size of it,” William T. said finally to the admissions woman, after answering all her questions. “She’s my daughter-in-law.”
The woman had nodded and tapped her pencil against a small pad of paper.
“Unless she’s not anymore, given the situation,” William T. said. “I don’t know if she still is or not. It’s something I can’t seem to figure out.”
The point of the woman’s pencil was extremely sharp. William T. had frowned at it.
“You be careful with that pencil,” he said. “I notice you’ve got it extremely sharp. Watch that someone doesn’t throw it to you and you catch it and close your palm by instinct, like I did here.”
He took off his driving glove and showed her the blue-black spot in the middle of his right palm.
“Take a look at that. Third grade. My wife did that. Ex, I mean. She tossed me a pencil and I caught it.”
He studied the pencil point, trapped in his flesh lo these many years, and then realized that his dirty fingernails were showing. He shoved his hand back into the leather driving glove.
“Listen. She’s smart, Sophie. She might not seem it, at first glance, but she is.”
The woman looked at him.
“You can take my word for it.”
Still looking.
“And she wants to do something with her life.”
“So you want to help her, your girl, this Sophie,” she said. “Is that why you came down here?”
Horribly, unexpectedly, William T. felt tears coming on. Jesus Christ. He stared at his leather driving glove, the one that hid the pencil point his wife had embedded in his palm when she was a child with long auburn hair, and willed them away. Do not cry. Do not cry. The woman looked out the window. William T. stared at his soft calfskin gloves.
“Yes,” he said. “That is correct.”
THE LIGHTS WERE STILL ON AT CRYSTAL’S Diner, even though it was dark and the neon sign blinked “Closed,” so William T. pulled his truck up alongside Jewell’s and crossed the street. Crystal sat in the booth next to the one where Johnny lay draped and sleeping, a scatter of red crayons about his head. She was sewing buttons on a denim jacket. Shiny buttons: gold and silver, clear plastic, enamel, rhinestone even. They sparkled even in the dim light, a row of mismatched circles, tracing a random path hither and yon. A Johnny jacket, no doubt.
“William T.,” she said, and looked up at him, then quickly down at her finger. He watched as she put it in her mouth.
“Stuck yourself?”
She nodded.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
He sat with her, opposite her, and watched as she sewed. It was February, and the diner was chilly. William T. had two flannel shirts on, the slit-armed one underneath, and on top, a red plaid one that Burl had given him for his forty-ninth birthday and that he had never worn before today.
“I brought something for Johnny,” William T. said.
He pulled out a brown paper Jewell’s Grocery bag and took a forty-eight-count box of crayons out of it.
“That was nice of you, William T.,” Crystal said.
She opened up the box and peered in.
“They’re all red,” she said.
“That is correct,” William T. said. “A gift for a man who appreciates red in all its manifestations.”
“How’d you do that?” she said. “You can’t buy them that way.”
“Let me tell you something, Crystal,” he said. “For future reference. Every box of ninety-six contains a red, a brick red, a maroon, a wild strawberry, a scarlet, a magenta, a metallic red, a razzmatazz, a violet red, and a purple pizzazz.”
“Purple pizzazz?”
“It sounds wrong but it looks right,” William T. said.
He plucked the purple pizzazz out of the box and held it up for her inspection.
“Yes it does,” Crystal agreed. “It does look right.”
“I wanted to throw in a mulberry and a red violet,” William T. said. “But I noticed that Johnny never chooses them when he’s coloring. They sit there in that box, eternally sharp.”
Crystal picked up another button—round and covered with metallic fabric—and sewed it onto the breast pocket of the denim jacket.
“Tell me about your boy, William T.,” Crystal said. “I’d like to hear you talk about him.”
“You knew him.”
“Did I?” she said. “I knew someone named William J. who was the same age as Johnny. I knew how he liked his eggs. I watched him tease Eliza, and I watched her laugh when he did, the only time I used to see her laugh.”
William T. watched Crystal’s needle slipping in and out of the fabric, securing each button with a crisscross of red thread, repeated
four times and then knotted tight in a complicated way that William T. couldn’t figure out even though he watched her do it three times.
“What else?” he said.
“His arm was always around Sophie,” Crystal said. “I used to watch them walk up the bleachers at the basketball games two at a time and sit in the highest row.”
She flexed her fingers and then blew on them.
“Are you cold?” he said.
“A little. I’ve got to get the boiler checked.”
William T. took her hands and rubbed them between his own.
“Thank you,” she said. “And I used to watch him with Burl. I drove by Burl’s once and there they sat, Burl singing, William J. listening.”
William T. nodded. He picked up the jam holder; the jams were all mixed up. There was a certain kind of person who shuffled through each pile, thinking that below the grape and strawberry and orange marmalade and mixed fruit must be something new, a surprise jam, an unknown jam tastier than any of the others.
William T. re-sorted the jams in their four-square plastic holder. Crystal sewed on another button, a gilt-edged square one.
An unknown someone had stuck an opened packet back into one of the piles.
Slob.
“I know that he liked jam on his English muffins,” Crystal said.
“Strawberry.”
“Strawberry, yes.”
“He was not a marmalade man,” William T. said. “Marmalade did not appeal to William J.”
Crystal smiled.
“Those are some of the things I knew about William J.,” she said. “But I would like to know more.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know. Because he was your son.”
William T. picked up the sugar shaker and toyed with its metal flap. In his booth next to them Johnny slept on, soundless.
“We took him to Florida once when he was little,” he said. “They give away free cups of orange juice when you cross the border, did you know that?”
Crystal shook her head.
“Maybe they don’t anymore. I don’t know. But he loved that, the cup of juice. And the palm trees. And at the motel there was a bed that if you put quarters in it jiggled.”
“Did you give him a bunch of quarters then?”
“As I recall, that damn bed jiggled all night long. And once, this was only a few years ago, we were loading up some firewood that I had stacked out by the spruce woods, and Max— you remember Max?”
“Max your dog who used to bite Tamar Winter’s father?”
“Yes. That Max. So I had to relieve myself and I did it in the snow. And suddenly I felt something warm on my leg, and there was Max peeing, too. Right on me, like I was a fence post.”
“Your own dog peed on you?”
She laughed, the soft laugh that he remembered from the night she drove him home from the hospital, past the Buchholzes’ barn.
“Yeah,” William T. said. “My own dog peed on me. And William J. never let me forget it either.”
“Keep going,” Crystal said. Her needle appeared and reappeared out of the worn denim of the jacket. She was embroidering now, a curving line of red thread that seemed to have no rhyme or reason until William T. looked at it again and saw that it had become a J.
“We used to drive down to Jewell’s on Sundays when he was little,” William T. said. “I used to give him half the list: the milk, the noodles, the butter, the tuna. And when his half of the groceries were loaded into the cart, I’d tell him what a good job he’d done and buy him a Persian doughnut.”
“Did you?”
“Persians were his favorites. He liked the glaze.”
“Did he?”
Her voice, an incantation. After the Persian was gone they would load the groceries into the truck and head home to North Sterns. William T. would feed the flock and whatever other animals were around. Eliza would sit at the kitchen table grading papers. William J. would spread out his string and his metal tubes and his sticks and whatever else he planned to use and make a wind chime. That was a Sunday, the way they used to be. Sometimes Burl would come down after church and help William J. with the chimes. Burl would actually tune the chimes, shaving off some metal here, cutting more there. Burl had the ability. Burl had perfect pitch. And the Sunday would pass, and so would the week, and then another Sunday would roll around again. When Sophie came into their lives she had stood in the kitchen baking. Sophie could spend an entire Sunday baking. Cornbread, carrot cake, blueberry pie. Did Sophie bake anymore?
“Tell me something else. Tell me something from after he lost his hearing.”
“He didn’t laugh the same. When you lose your hearing it doesn’t matter how long you’ve known how to talk, it changes.”
“Does it?”
“It does. It changes your laugh. It changes the way you sing.”
Johnny groaned in his sleep. Was he dreaming something that made him sad? Would his sadness leave him, and would he return to sleep?
“Tell me something else. Something from later.”
Later?
What was there to tell? That William J. had sat across the table from his father, and William T. had wanted to reach out and grab his son’s hands, stop him from slipping away, slipping through his fingers?
It had been a spring day, that day, a spring day with the promise of heat and more heat to come. The sun was ever higher in the heavens. The lettuce had been plucked twice already. The summer held itself out like a promise, cornfields showing green against dark brown. Only the flock preferred to be inside, huddled in their broken-down barn, ignoring the world beyond the latched door, the enormous world with its light and air.
“He told me he was thinking of doing it,” William T. whispered. “That’s what I can’t get out of my head.”
Crystal put her needle down and reached across the table for his hands.
“Did he?”
“He did. He sat across the kitchen table from me and said that he was thinking of ending it. He said it several times. He said it over several months. He kept saying it, Crystal.”
“Did he?”
Her question was not a question but a response, the soft refrain to his whispers. Did he, did he, did he.
“And I can’t forgive myself for it. I’ll never forgive myself for it.”
“Forgive yourself for what?”
“For not grabbing on. For not reaching across the table and just holding on to his hands. For telling him he couldn’t. For telling him that it would get better. That it would get better. That it would someday be better, and that he should just hold on and wait.”
“Maybe he thought it wouldn’t, William T. Maybe he thought it wouldn’t ever get better, whatever it was that he needed to get better.”
“I should have helped him. I should have stopped him.”
Crystal drew her knees up onto the booth bench and wrapped her arms around her legs. William T. could see the muscles of her thighs through the worn denim of her jeans. She rarely wore anything but jeans, men’s because she said they were more comfortable. There was no dress code at Crystal’s Diner.
“You couldn’t have helped him, William T.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“If someone wants to do what William J. did, he will do it. That’s what I believe. And nothing you could have done or said would have stopped him.”
He looked at her. There was something in her face, a firmness that had never been there before. At least that he could remember.
One of William J.’s wind chimes was tied to the coat hook by Johnny’s booth. William J. had known that Johnny loved shiny things. Maybe the sun would shine again someday, and maybe when Johnny, who loved shinies, woke up he would look out the window and see silver tubes glinting in the sun, and maybe he would smile in the way he smiled, and maybe then a breeze would come whispering through the diner, and the chimes would brush against one another and play their notes, and he would sit and listen to the sound. H
appy. Who was William T. to know?
“Is Johnny awake?” William T. said. “I want to give him his crayons.”
She shook her head. But for the fan-shaped lines at the corners of her eyes and the patience worn into her face she could be a child, curled into the booth, her arms wrapped around her knees.
“Crystal, you never answered my question.”
“Which one?”
“About the cat out for a walk in the pine woods. The cat who couldn’t meow, but all its life it tries and tries and tries, and then a tree comes falling straight down and smashes it flat.”
“There is no answer. I’m dead.”
“Crystal. Please.”
“William T.,” she said. “Hush.”
“Please.”
She wrapped her hands around his own.
“Well,” she said. “Were I that cat, I hope that I was loving the smell of the pines and the way the ground felt under my paws.”
She brushed the hair out of her eyes.
“And that right up to the very end I was still trying to meow, thinking that if I just kept on trying, maybe someday a sound would come out.”
She threaded the needle through the pocket of the denim jacket and folded it carefully, so that the needle was hidden in the thickest part of the fold.
“Here’s a question for you, William T. If you could have known back then what you know now, would you still choose to have lived your life? To have raised your animals and seen your trees grow, to have married and had your son?”
“Look what happened to my life.”
Johnny woke with a start and sat up. He reached out to the wind chime and ran a finger along its length, tipping the string so that silver tubes cascaded against one another. Back and forth he tipped the wind chimes, his head bent to the side.
“Even so,” Crystal said. “Even so.”
WILLIAM T. FED THE FLOCK AND THEN WALKED down Route 274, away from where his house stood on its hill. He took a left onto Sterns Valley Road, where pine and maple and oak lined both sides of the rutted dirt and stretched for a hundred and more acres. On the left-hand side unmarked passages between the trees led to trailers or small houses.
Was It Beautiful? Page 16